SCHULTZ, DR. DOROTHEA
(Cracow, 1944- )--Slavist, university professor in Jerusalem, maiden name Kwaszniewska. Her records at Jagelloian University in Poland, where she graduated, and at Yale University in the United States, where she earned her doctorate, give no details about her origin. The daughter of a Jewish mother and a Polish father, Kwaszniewska was born in Cracow under unusual circumstances. Her mother had left behind a written note which had belonged to Dorothea's father: "My heart is a daughter; I orient myself by the stars, and my heart by the moon and by the pain that lies at the end of all speed. . . ." Kwaszniewska never discovered who had written these words. Her mother's brother, Ashkenaz Scholem, disappeared in the Jewish pogrom in 1943 during the German occupation of Poland, but he managed to save his sister before disappearing. Taking maters into his own hands, he got her forged papers in the name of a Polish woman, and then he married her. The wedding took place in Warsaw, in the Church of St. Thomas, and it was considered a marriage between a converted Jew and a Polish woman. He was smoking mint tea instead of tobacco when he was taken away, and his sister and wife, Ana Scholem, who was still taken for a Polish woman and indeed carried the maiden name of one Ana Zakiewicz, promptly divorced her husband (and brother, a fact known only to her), thereby saving her skin. She immediately remarried. Her second husband was a widower named Kwaszniewska who had eyes like freckled egg-shells, a feeble tongue, but horned thoughts. They had only one child--Dorothea Kwaszniewska. After getting he degree in Slavic studies, Dorothea went to the United States, where she later obtained her doctorate in Old Slavonic literature. But when Isaac Schultz, whom she knew from her student days, moved to Israel, she went there to join him. In 1967 he was wounded in the Israeli-Egyptian was, and the very next year she married him, lived in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, conducted courses in the history of early Christianity among the Slavs, but kept mailing letters to herself in Poland. She addressed them to the street where she used to live in Cracow, and these letters, which Kwaszniewska, now Mrs. Schultz, wrote to herself were kept by her former Cracow land-lady unopened in Poland, in the hope that one day she would be able to hand them over to Dorothea. Except for one or two, the letters are short and represent a kind of diary kept by Dr. Dorothea Schultz from 1968 to 1982. They have to do with the Khazars, inasmuch as the last letter, written from detentive custody in Istanbul, touches upon the Khazar polemic. There letters are given here in chronological order.
5. Haifa again, September 1975
6. October '78
8. Department of Slavic Studies, Yale University, USA October 1980
10. Istanbul, Kingston Hotel, October 1, 1982